Chapter 1307 - Taming the Old World - Light Dragons - 11

Chapter 1307: Chapter 1307 - Taming the Old World - Light Dragons - 11

Up in the northern front, Selphira’s strategy was dictating the pace of the siege.

The battlefield dynamics here played out exactly as they had anticipated. The Vanguard’s massive combined assault continuously damaged the ethereal Light Dragon, and the guardian effortlessly mended those wounds.

It was a grinding stalemate of attrition with no clear end in sight.

Selphira’s sub-zero environmental control was absolutely vital. Her localized winter stripped away the beast’s thermal camouflage and shattered its illusions, providing the human and even mutant artillery with a clear, solid target.

However, exposing the dragon was not the same as killing it. Even with its tricks neutralized, the creature’s raw restorative power remained a monstrous hurdle.

For the time being, the human forces and the corrupted horde were not engaging one another.

The Vanguard artillery did not redirect fire toward the mutant lines, and the beasts did not look up to shoot at the human formations. Both armies focused entirely on whittling down the guardian, locked in an unspoken, highly pragmatic truce of convenience. Yet, Selphira was fully aware that this fragile equilibrium could shatter at any given second.

The Witch’s forces could pivot and launch an offensive the moment the calculus shifted in their favor.

Selphira weighed her two immediate options.

The first option was to maintain the current tempo: allow the mutant horde to continue pouring their ether into the dragon, and even keep passively assisting them by keeping the target exposed.

This cooperative siege would significantly accelerate the guardian’s downfall. With two strong armies hammering the beast simultaneously, they could likely secure the kill before Selthia’s reinforcements from the south arrived. According to Arturo’s updated logistics, those six marching Diamonds were still roughly three and a half hours away from this peak. A rapid execution would allow the Vanguard to snatch the prize and retreat before the board became unmanageable.

The second option was to pivot her entire battalion and strike the mutant army right now.

But that aggressive play carried an enormous risk... If the corrupted horde suddenly found itself attacked on the mountain again, Selthia might decide to cut her losses in the north entirely. She could order her surviving forces to abandon the guardian and march straight down toward the capital, throwing their weight against the perimeter Arturo was currently struggling to hold.

Furthermore, Selthia had stationed six towering Diamond mutants on this front. Selphira honestly did not know if the Vanguard could win a direct clash against six titans without Ren’s burst damage or Liora’s fire, nor did she know how much energy invested or many casualties they would suffer trying.

Therefore, for the immediate present, maintaining the relatively peaceful, cooperative siege was the most prudent course of action.

Selphira ordered her troops to keep conserving their mana. They played their designated role, launching flashy, highly visible barrages to maintain pressure and keep the dragon’s illusions suppressed, but they held back their deepest reserves. They did not commit their full output to a battle whose ending was still clouded in uncertainty.

It was the quiet prudence of four hundred years of warfare. Never spend what you cannot afford to replace until the perfect moment arrives.

The northern front remained paused. It was tense, coiled like a spring, yet stable.

The southern front, however, had just shattered its own pause.

????

In the southern foothills, the ruined carcass of the Light Guardian hauled itself upright.

Something buried deep within its hollowed-out stomach was acting as an artificial and very hard to breach core, instantly replacing the transcendent heart Ren had just ripped from its chest.

Worse still, the mangled flesh was now regenerating significantly faster than before.

It was not the elegant, holy restoration of a Light Guardian. It was something far more voracious, frantic, and chillingly familiar.

It was regenerating exactly like a corrupted mutant.

To fully grasp the horrific anomaly unfolding in here, one would have to rewind the clock several years and trace the flight path of an explorer named Kieran across the southern forests of Yano.

The entity currently reanimating the dragon’s corpse had nothing to do with the dragon itself.

Years ago, a highly aggressive species of golden fungi had begun to claim territory in that southern forest, Ren’s unintentional courtesy.

It operated as a brutal parasite, infecting native beasts, using their bodies as fuel, and turning them into walking vessels to spread its spores. Almost no one in the kingdom ever learned of its existence; the only man to document the outbreak up close was a Yino scout who held no allegiance to humanity, and his field notes would never reach the capital.

From that sprawling golden infection, an aberrant apex predator was born. It was a beast adapted solely to devour other creatures and steal their capabilities, a chimeric nightmare that scaled its own power by cannibalizing everything in its path.

However, that golden network, an infection that had simply bloomed too late in the evolutionary arms race, did not survive to see its potential realized.

Long before Dragarion laid waste to the old world, one of the initial waves of corrupted beasts, guided by Hagen on an expedition from Yino, swept through that southern forest. The purple rot aggressively annihilated the golden fungi before it could establish a permanent foothold, destroying an entire parallel ecosystem that could have served as a secondary foundation for Mooshito’s network. The golden system lost its utility and was wiped from the map.

But the single aberrant beast born from that golden system did not die. The five-eyed light mutant, the chimeric predator that had thrived alongside the fungi, survived the purge.

In many ways, that golden beast was the exact antithesis of the purple mutants Selthia bred today. It was born from golden spores rather than dark corruption, yet it was equally aberrant, equally voracious, and equally capable of stealing the powers of its prey.

It was a perfect, inverted mirror of the modern swarm.

It fled the corrupted horde ravaging its home forest, driving itself deeper into the southern mountains. Along the way, it fought, killed, and assimilated countless wild beasts, stacking new abilities one after another until it finally reached the peak of the Light Guardian.

Exhausted from constant flight and endless combat, the golden mutant attempted to conquer the guardian, and it lost.